reality show contestants

The time slot right after the Super Bowl is usually a good place to air. And CBS is hoping that holds for its new reality show, 'Undercover Boss.'

With more than 100 million viewers set to tune in, some are too lazy, too stuffed with party food or (let's face it) too drunk to change the channel. So, they'll stick around for whatever comes on after the final whistle. This year, it's

The new pilot is a stealth reality show -- looking to combine the cheap, easy ingredients of interoffice drama, humor and shock reveals. The title is self-explanatory, but the premise takes a large company and sends its CEO in as an average employee. As that CEO mixes and mingles with his fellow employees, he gets to see what their days are like, whether they enjoy their jobs, etc.

I've noticed that one of the more overused phrases on reality shows is "I'm not here to make friends." It's that moment in the competition where some controversy/confrontation comes up and the player that everyone seems to dislike the most explains to them that they're "there to win the game" and "not here to make friends." Of course, the fact that many of these people probably can't make friends even in real life probably doesn't even cross their minds.

Interesting piece by Noel Murray over at The Onion's AV Club. He calls Hell's Kitchen entertaining, but "one of the least transparent of the competitive reality shows." He argues that we always see the personal lives of the contestants on shows like Survivor and Project Runway, but that the players on Hell's Kitchen seem to have no life before or after the show.

But Hell's Kitchen comes from that weird extra-dimensional Fox TV Reality realm, where contestants have no apparent life before or after taping begins-aside from the inevitable glimpse of family members during the finale-and even the game itself seems completely stage-managed. I know Gordon Ramsay's a real dude-I've watched his terrific BBC series Kitchen Nightmares-but I've rarely been convinced that that any of the show's competing chefs have any real interest in cooking for a living, or that their "customers" are anything more than Fox employees and Hollywood extras. (I did see last season's runner-up Ralph on Iron Chef America, though who knows what happened to Michael, who in some kind of shady back-room deal took an apprenticeship with Ramsay over his own restaurant.)